Cut Thin to Win

Chapter 6

I was fortunate in catching a through jet plane to Denver.

The hostess probably thought I was the most surly passenger the line had ever carried. They tried to make things nice for me but ‘I sat there trying to fit pieces of the puzzle together.

We glided over the orange groves of California, gathering altitude; rocketed across the desert; crossed the chain of lakes formed by the Colorado River, and on into the Rocky Mountains.

The scenery was breathtaking, stupendously beautiful, but I sat frowning contemplation and I still couldn’t put the puzzle together.

I arrived in Denver, went to a phone booth and looked up the Dawson Re-Debenture Discount Security Company.

There was no listing.

I called Information and asked for a number. There was no number.

I looked at the richly embossed card Clayton Dawson had given me and called the telephone number which was given on the card as the number of the executive offices.

A well-modulated feminine voice answered the telephone simply repeating the number I had called.

I said, “Are these the offices of the Dawson Re-Debenture Discount Security Company?”

“Yes, they are,” she said.

“I would like to talk with Clayton Dawson, assistant to the president.”

“Just a moment,” she said.

There was silence for a moment; then the voice again, crisply efficient, “No, he’s not in at the moment. May I take a message, please?”

“When do you expect him in?”

“I’m not able to give out that information. May I ask who’s calling?”

“Just an old friend of his,” I said. “Purely a social matter. Forget it,” and hung up before she could ask more questions.

I called a cab and gave the driver the address on the card.

The office building was there all right; the right floor was there; the room which had been given on the card as presidential headquarters was there but it said HELEN LOOMIS, Public Stenographer; down below appeared, ANSWERING SERVICE, in parentheses; and over on the right was a string of names on the ground glass, mostly mining companies. The name of Dawson Re-Debenture Discount Security Company didn’t appear there.

I walked in.

It was a two-room affair, a reception room and an inner office marked Private, which could probably be used by any one of the subtenants if he had to have a place for a private conference.

The woman who sat at the reception desk, with an electric typewriter over on the side, was an individual who had pounded out a lot of words in her lifetime. She had washed-out, weary eyes, but she had taken a lot of care of her personal appearance and could have been anywhere from fifty to sixty-five. Her manner was crisply capable.

She was typical of hundreds of thousands of women who had started out as stenographers, became secretaries, married and left the job; then, after a while, these women were widowed and had to go back to work, only to find that the good jobs were no longer available for those who were older and a little “rusty” with their shorthand. But this woman had probably finally secured work by sheer merit and determination, worked herself up, then reached an age where someone decided she was no longer sufficiently decorative and had sent her off to the secretarial junk pile.

The only difference was Helen Loomis hadn’t gone to the junk pile. She’d scraped together enough money to get a couple of rooms in an office building; had lined up enough clients to keep her going as a public stenographer; opened a telephone answering service and a mail drop for half a dozen promoters who couldn’t afford office space, and probably some fly-by-nights who wanted to do business by mail.

“Miss Loomis?” I asked.

“Yes,” she said.

“I understand you have an answering service and furnish office space.”

“That’s right.”

“I’d like to find out a little more about it. I’m thinking of organizing a company here in Denver. What are your rates?”

“That depends entirely upon the type of company, the amount of work, and the number of telephone calls.”

I said, “This would probably be limited to not more than one telephone call a day, and not more than thirty letters a month, but I might want to use the private office at times.”

She said, “We have this room available for private conferences, and— What was your name?” she asked.

“Lam,” I told her. “Donald Lam.”

“And what is the nature of your business, Mr. Lam.”

“I am an investment counselor,” I said. “I would like to begin in a small way.”

“Oh, yes, rates would be forty-five dollars a month for putting your name on the door, having an answering service, taking messages and the reasonable use of the private office... Of course, you understand I have other clients and, at times, there might be a conflict.”

“Thank you,” I told her. “I’ll think it over and let you know within the next day or two.”

“Very well,” she said. And then asked, “How did you hear about my service? How did you happen to come to me?”

“One of your clients,” I said, “a Clayton Dawson.”

Her eyes suddenly hardened. “I thought I recognized your voice. Weren’t you the person who called on the telephone and asked for Mr. Dawson?”

“That’s right,” I said. “I’m an old friend of his and thought I’d let him perform the introductions, if he was in.”

“My clients very rarely put in time at the office,” she said. “It’s used mostly for an answering service.”

“You haven’t any idea where I could get hold of Clay now?” I asked.

“Clay?” she inquired.

I laughed apologetically. “Clayton Dawson.”

“Oh, no, Mr. Dawson was in earlier today, picked up a special delivery letter and went out. I’m sorry, I don’t have a home address for him.”

“Well,” I said, “if he comes in, tell him to be sure to get in touch with his old friend, Donald Lam.”

“And where will you be, Mr. Lam?”

I laughed and said, “Clay knows where he can reach me, all right. Clay’s the one who is the rolling stone. He’s always into something, usually something new. He’s the promoter type.”

“I see,” she said, in a manner which intimated the interview was being terminated.

“I’ll get in touch with you if I go ahead with this deal,” I said, and walked out.

The Merchants’ Credit Association had two Clayton Dawsons, and neither one of them could by any possibility of the imagination be the one I wanted. No one had ever heard of a Dawson Re-Debenture Discount Security Company.

The registrar of voters had several Dawsons but, here again, no one who could be my man, judging from ages.

I went to the car rental agencies and inquired if a Clayton Dawson had rented a car from them within the last two weeks or ten days, and drew blank.

The Clayton Dawson who had called on me was a shadow who had given Denver as a phony background. He had carefully laid his plans so he couldn’t be traced.

And Sergeant Frank Sellers was going to take my license unless I came up with the name of my client in forty-eight hours.

If I tried giving Sergeant Sellers the story of what actually happened, he would throw the book at me for being a poor liar and not being able to make up a better story than that.

I took a cab to the airport and found that I had to wait two hours for a plane back to Los Angeles.